Contra the herd
Apologies to the investment newsletter of a similar name, but our sluggish market raises the question: Does it make sense to be a contrarian in Victoria’s real estate market? To find out, I looked at...
Category: Weekly
Should home prices go down?
Four years ago Liberal MLA Adam Vaughan appeared in a TVO interview and was asked what to do about runaway prices that had jumped 25% in a year. Despite the huge jump he said that...
What it’s costing to run a house
Just over a decade ago I wrote this article detailing the costs to run our fairly average house. At the time, the total annual cost for taxes, insurance, and utilities for our 1970s ~2100 sqft...
How to value garden suites
I’ve written about garden suites in the past, noting that though they’ve been legalized on paper in some municipalities for a couple decades, the uptake so far has been slow. However with the province pushing...
Election: Temper your expectations
We’re one day into the campaign, and just like the provincial election last fall, both parties have immediately forgotten their previous concern about budgets and deficits and switched to handing out goodies to the electorate. ...
Sales waver in the face of strong new listings
Brief update as I’ve been out of town, but I thought it was worth noting that while are still slightly ahead (+5%) of this time last year, activity has been slowly losing steam these last...
Blood from a stone
The BC Budget was released last week, and there was essentially very little new in it, especially on housing. Other than continuing funding for various programs already in place, the only real change was increasing...
Victoria growth more dependent on immigration, but that will change
Last year the federal government panicked about the negative public reaction to extraordinary population growth in Canada in the last couple years. Beyond slashing the number of temporary residents (mostly international students and temporary workers),...
Supply side update
It’s tough to make the development math work these days, and builders are struggling to make a choice between building rentals (that will complete into a dramatically weakening rental market) or build condos at a...